


The Satanic Losers' Society

by universe_c



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, F/M, Homophobia, Humanstuck, M/M, Occult, Recreational Drug Use, Religious Fanaticism, Sexist Language, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-04-25
Packaged: 2018-01-20 18:53:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1521806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/universe_c/pseuds/universe_c
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only boy who could ever reach me was the son of a preacher man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Satanic Losers' Society

**Author's Note:**

  * For [youdidnotseeme](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=youdidnotseeme).



> Though this fic has elements of supernatural romance and stoner comedy it is at heart a horror story. The characters are not nice people and their relationship is by no means a model of sweet and healthy romance.
> 
> There will be MANY additional warnings added by the end. I will be updating the list as the chapters are posted. Please feel free to contact me for clarification or specific questions about the warning list.
> 
> Please note that the author does not condone or endorse the behavior of the characters in this fic. PLEASE DO NOT TRY ANYTHING YOU READ ABOUT IN THIS FIC AT HOME.

You are walking to work when you notice that guy with the triangular anime shades standing in the park holding two open umbrellas. You recognize him because he comes into the store sometimes to buy cutesy cartoon merch. You think he must have some sort of sporadically paying side job, since his visits are rare but he drops a lot of cash at each one. Maybe a drug dealer. His popped collar, fingerless gloves and neon orange baseball hat make him look like a pretender moving through a scene he doesn't understand. The umbrella he’s holding over himself is bright pink and patterned with Hello Kitty. The second one, yellow with a rubber duckie face stamped on it, he is holding over someone seated on the ground.

The person on the ground is a teenaged kid, homeless judging by his clothes and the giant, battered backpack he’s clutching like a shield. His bare knees stick out from under his olive duster; his ragged shorts and duct taped sneakers look sodden. His hair is dishwater blond and messily cropped short. There is something familiar about him. Maybe you’ve seen him sitting in this park before without actively noticing. The kid snarls up at your customer, knocks the yellow umbrella out of his hand, then looks off to one side, crossing his arms. Shades guy shrugs and walks off, leaving the duck umbrella where it fell. He gives you a nod as he saunters by. The kid makes no move to pick up the umbrella and glares furiously when he sees you watching.

At work, some child dumps the bins of hacky sacks, pokemon cards and gothic temporary tattoos all over the floor. Its mother hustles it out without bothering to apologize or help pick up. You have an excellent smile for retail, the kind of smile you can hide any emotion behind except actual happiness. It is as smooth, bland, and perfect as you can make it. You have been working on it for a long time.  
As you punch out, your manager reminds you that you’re required to dress up for the steam punk promotion starting next week. Corporate uses these promo costume requirements as a totally unsubtle way of getting employees to spend their paycheck in the store. As if all the high school kids aren’t doing that anyway. All those dumb motherfuckers unironically think the crap you sell here is cool. You decide to do what you usually do when you need a costume - go to your grandfather’s for dinner and raid his attic. You see no sign of the homeless kid or the yellow umbrella on your way back through the park.

Dede and Gamzee are not in the house when you arrive, which means they are most likely out in the goat barn. The kitchen smells of roasting lamb and cinnamon tea, a pot of lentils and rice covered on the stove. Half of the attic is a pleasant, slope-roofed bedroom set up for guests, though your grandfather rarely has any. The other half of the attic is packed with trunks and boxes, stacks of rolled up carpets and paintings. Your grandfather is a compulsive collector with a particular taste for clothes and textiles. There’s enough garishly patterned vintage clothing up here to open a motherfucking consignment store. You could charge a good markup for it all, too. Dede’s taste runs expensive and loud.

Most of the hat boxes in the stack are empty and a few contain things other than hats: a snarl of fur and leather scraps, a flower press, a small packet of acid paper and dried mushrooms. Eventually you do find an old bowler with a yellowing ribbon. An ornate jewelry box provides you with some tarnished chains. You finish it off with an old brass drawer pull and a faded silk rose. A collared shirt with some black ribbons tied around your arms and one of the less offensive brocade waistcoats, and your look is passable.

“Well, well,” your grandfather says as you stand at the full length mirror in the hall. “Look what a dashing young gentleman turned up for dinner.”

“It’s for work,” you explain. “I tried to call, but you weren’t picking up. When are you going to get a cell phone?”

The old goat cracks a yellow-toothed grin. “My ancient ass is too moss-covered for all your shiny toys. But you wait right here, torun. I’ve got a few choice items for you.”

The silk scarf he retrieves is an eye-gouging mess of pink and purple flowers with unnaturally green foliage. He shows you how to knot it like a cravat and spends far too long fussing with the way it drapes. You look down at his cloud of silver-grey hair, trying not to tap your foot.

“There we are, there we are,” he says, straightening your waistcoat. “And the most important. Don’t look, now.”

You sigh and close your eyes. Something heavy drops into your vest pocket and he tells you you can look with barely restrained glee. It is an enormous gold watch on a gold chain, its face jammed with tiny dials which tell the day, date and phase of the moon. You remember playing with it, winding it and watching its works run, pretending it let you travel through time. Looking at it now, you’re not sure what Dede was thinking, letting a child play with such a fine antique.

“I haven’t used it in years and years, but it should still work fine. It’s the kind you have to wind. Only thing of my father’s I didn’t end up selling. Well, time enough for stories later, after we eat.”

“I can’t accept this.”

“Don’t give me any of your shit, torun. I remember well enough how you used to love this old thing. Let an old man pass on his legacy while he’s still alive to see you enjoy it! Besides, I have plenty of other watches.”

He flicks back his purple knit shawl to display the watch he’s wearing, a black and neon pink monstrosity straight out of the late eighties. He cackles at the look on your face, then shoos you off to change and wash your hands.

Later, stuffed with lamb and rice, you settle with Dede and Gamzee around the hookah. You are high as shit after a couple of hits, high enough to make Dede’s stories pretty interesting.

“After my mother died,” he says, exhaling a cloud of smoke, “That watch was the only valuable I kept. Would have sold it too, if I hadn’t found a job out on Coney Island. New York was wonderful and terrible in those days. Not all sterilized like they keep it now. Ha! You know, I haven’t thought about this in years, but I almost lost that watch. There were flocks of kids who used to hang around the boardwalk trying to rip off the tourists. One of them had the balls to try and pickpocket me. Thinking he could pull one over on an Istanbul street rat like me, pfah. I pulled my knife on him, put the fear of God into him a little, then marched him up to the boss’s office and got him a job carting garbage. He was a nasty customer, that one. Always scowling, never a kind word for anyone. My mother would have called it nazar, the evil eye. Impossible to keep him out of trouble, though I tried. When he disappeared, we all figured he’d finally pissed off the wrong people and gotten himself run out of town or killed.”

The rule around the hookah is that no one leaves until everyone tells a story. Gamzee goes next, spinning a rather incoherent yarn that sounds like Peter Pan crossed the plot of some anime. You wind the watch idly as he speaks. It gives a heavy tick-tick-tick you can feel through the case and all the way up your forearm. For your turn, you find yourself recounting the incident of the homeless kid and the two umbrellas. The cadence of your words takes on the steady rhythm of the watch, until you almost think you can feel it ticking in your chest, and okay, yes. You are definitely not good to drive.

You spend the night in your old room with your iron bedstead and shelves of books and papers. In the morning you rattle around the kitchen. Gamzee is already at school and your grandfather is out in the barn again. You take the eighth Dede left out for you and tuck the money for it into his wallet. You may be broke, but you don’t want his charity. You barely make it to work on time; some kind of accident has traffic jammed outside of town. After a long day of intimidating kids out of shoplifting, your car drops its muffler halfway back to your apartment.

At home, Horuss is attempting to cook something elaborate, as he does whenever he forgets just how badly it turned out last time. Damara and Rufioh are either arguing or fucking in their room, voices raised under pounding music. The leak in your shower is getting worse, but the first five calls you've put in to the landlord have netted zero results. Your lease is not over for a few months and you're struggling to save for a new security deposit. There's pretty much no way you're getting this one back after Horuss' brother put that hole in the wall. But you are out from under your father's thumb and that makes each and every one of these inconveniences so motherfucking worth it.  
You idly decide to look up the make and model of the watch. After an hour of double checking, you conclude that it’s worth several thousand dollars, more than everything else you own put together. You feel cold all over when you remember that you left it in your car in the mall parking lot your whole shift, negligently bundled into a plastic shopping bag with your steam punk outfit. You will have to figure out how to keep it safe, even if it means keeping it on you at all times. You fall asleep with it clutched in one hand, its heavy ticking echoing through your chest.

You dream of the smell of cold loam in your nostrils, lying on cold ground, listening to the whisper and rustle of small things moving in the leaves all around you. The watch is still clenched in your fist when you wake, though your hand has migrated under your pillow. The watch has run down while you were asleep. The time it shows is later today, but you read online that the old wind up watches often run fast. You wind it again on impulse, thinking that you’re not sure whether it’s better for it to be wound or left alone. You check your real clock, setting the time on the watch, and realize that you forgot to set your alarm last night. You have to be at work in forty five minutes.

You are counting down the minutes until your cigarette break when you look up and notice the homeless kid from the umbrella incident. He spares the store a bored glance and you find your hand resting on the weight of the watch in your pocket, as if he might steal your only possession of real value. He is obviously not there to buy anything, his duster stiff with grime, his shoes and backpack covered with duct tape. You give him an hour until security tosses him out.

Over the next few weeks you start noticing him around the mall more and more often, usually hanging around the food court trying to table dive. Once you leave your lunch out half uneaten for him, trying not to look at him too obviously. The couple of times you do make eye contact with him, he glares murder at you until one or the other of you looks away. Another night, you notice him in the big sporting goods store as you’re on your way out to the parking lot. He’s arguing with the cashier, his gravely tenor echoing out into the hall. He’s apparently attempting to buy a case of power bars with a gift card and the cashier is stalling. You think she’s fishing for whether he stole the card, probably waiting for her manager to come help her. You step forward to intervene, though you’re not sure what you’ll say. He sees you watching and gives you a furious warning look. His voice lowers suddenly and whatever he says to the girl gets her to cash him out with no further trouble. You move on, not bothering to watch which way he leaves.

^^^

The first time you read The Satanic Bible, you are fifteen. You order it off the internet using your father's emergencies-only credit card, mentally daring him to notice. He does not. Your father has just embarked on his biggest revival tour ever, taking his new wife and her sharp, photogenic smile, and leaving yourself and your brother behind. You are stuck at your grandfather's house for the summer, a long, dusty bike ride from your few friends and all the underwhelming activities available near your shithole town's two traffic lights.

You gave up being frightened of the Devil when you decided you were no longer a child. You gave up believing in God when you realized that your father does not believe in God and certainly does not preach anything Jesus would approve of. All you want at fifteen is to expose him for the fraud he is, thundering damnation and lies and bigotry for material gain. Or, barring that, you want to make him so angry he'll have a motherfucking coronary and drop dead.

You do not expect Satanism to speak to you like it does. For one thing, you do not expect Satan to be presented as a facet of human nature rather than a deity. But it is as if someone turned a key in your mind, and all the thoughts you've been only half-daring to think click together into a coherent whole. The only thing worthwhile, the only thing _real_ is you yourself, your own thoughts and desires. God is an illusion. Authority is an illusion. Rules are an illusion. And these illusions are designed to oppress you, to keep you compliant and sheeplike and weak. Just like all those vicious and self-congratulatory idiots your father leeches off of.

Your father still does not notice when you use the emergencies-only credit card to order the rest of LeVay's complete works, his biographies, and a number of books by his sources and more recent Satanist authors. Luckily, your grandfather is completely indifferent as to how you spend your days. He never tries to make you come out of your room, wear colors other than black or do your chores. If you do not do them, they simply remain undone. Dede, meanwhile, spends all his time puttering around the barn and taking long walks in the woods. You don't bother trying to conceal your reading material and even leave a few of the introductory texts lying around for your little brother to find. Dede is a former flower child and admitted agnostic anyway. He and your father rarely talk.

The contradictions between LeVay’s two biographies lead you to the internet, the satanist forums, and well-researched pages debunking his whole life. You are both disgusted and impressed that he is a plagiarist and a charlatan, that he took you in even years after his death. His magic and his church are not so different than your father’s, you think: all showmanship, manipulation, and melodrama. What they call magic or miracles, you decide is all stagecraft and psychology. But, you suddenly understand, that does not take away from its power over people.

You don't believe in god and you also don't believe in magic, but you’ve been to your father’s church. You’ve seem him instructing his bouncers to keep the people in wheelchairs away from the stage at the beginning of the night and glowingly praising the power of his fakeass faith healing by the end. Ritual is a psychological trick you can play on yourself; the placebo effect works even if you know the pill is sugar. You can manipulate yourself as easily as you manipulate others, create of yourself anything you want. Your eyes are open. You are free.

You choose a new name for yourself and you decide to dedicate both it and your new life to the Left Hand Path. You spend days planning, wanting the ritual to be perfect in every detail. It will be a new birth in the direct opposite mode of being born again. You set up the altar on your desk and call to the four corners. You invoke the names of Satan, carefully reading the entire list, though half of them are actually just gods of other religions. Mid-chant you accidentally knock your chalice all over your notes. You finish the ceremony, but the moment and the momentum of it feel broken. You drink the sip of water left in the chalice and proclaim your new identity before the forces of darkness. To mark yourself as transformed, you pierce your own ear using a sewing needle and a plain stud you found in the guest room dresser. You go to bed frustrated and oddly disappointed.

In the morning you find one page of the notes has blurred nearly beyond legibility. Your heart rate picks up as you read the remaining letters:

I a m I an d y o U are **m In E** K ur l o z

It _must_ be a coincidence. You take another page of your notes and splatter it with tap water, watching the words bleed and run. No patterns emerge. You meticulously recreate your ceremony, copying out the same page of notes as exactly as you can remember and piercing your other ear. The water-soaked paper seems normal, though it may be staining the wood of your desk. You feel foolish.

You return to your room after helping feed the goats and wash the dishes. Dry, the paper reads:

Mi n e m in e **m I n e M I N E**

That night you do not sleep. You resist the urge to check on your little brother. Waking him would do neither of you real good. Your newly pierced ears keep bothering you when you try to lay on your side.

At one in the morning, you get up and prepare a different page, though you use paper from the same notebook and the same pen. At the top of the page you write 'Who are you?' You pick a random book off your shelf, open it to the middle and fill the rest of the space with random text. You perform the ceremony again, knocking the chalice over in the appropriate place.

This time, the message reads:

You ch o se M e

It is excruciating, waiting for each new page to dry. You set up your fan to speed the process and weight the pages with the heavy bowl and a candle holder, so they won't blow away. Your conversation, such as it is, still takes the rest of the night and into the next day.

'What do you want?' Returns:

y o u R S er v ice

'Why?' Returns again:

**Y O U C HO S E ME**

You take longer to prepare your next question, wracked with nerves and curiosity. You fall asleep in the early morning sun, waiting for the answer.

'What kind of service?'

I wi l l com e to Y o u . be r E a dy

And though you try with as many questions and variations of technique as you can think of, it does not work again. You go back online and buy every book about ritual magic that you can find. This time, your father's wife, who is also his lawyer and manager, calls and lectures you for spending so much money on the emergencies-only credit card. She says she will not tell your father unless you do it again and you think _bitch_ even though you kind of liked her once.

You work your way through every Satanist ritual book and then the satanic and choas magick websites, even the theistic ones. After that, you start in on the witchcraft books. None of the many, many spells you attempt to preform produce any result inexplicable through physics and psychology. Occasionally, you wonder if it was a dream, or if the old chalice you dug out of the hutch held some residual trace of LSD from the seventies. But you still have the six pages in an old school folder on your bookshelf, hidden in plain sight. When you become frustrated you open the folder and stare at your true, secret name, scattered in watery letters across the paper.

All the holes you punch through your ears get infected. Your grandfather puts one of his hippy salves on them, then takes you to the mall to pick out your own earrings. They all heal up eventually.

The school year has started by the time your father returns. Living with him is altogether less tolerable than living with your grandfather. Your father's house is a paragon of tasteful, discretely expensive normalcy, everything arranged as if waiting to be photographed. The presence of your father's new wife and her two daughters does nothing to make it feel like a home rather than a spread in some waiting room magazine. And your father is always watching, always listening for the slightest excuse to unleash a flood of his motherfucking toxic opinions. You hate the way your brother shrinks whenever he goes off about the queers, the way your step sisters go quiet and well-behaved around him. You provoke your father into a number of shouted arguments, first over your earrings, then by refusing to cut your hair. You dye it a cheap midnight black and start wearing black nail polish. You take every scrap of non-black clothing you own to the thrift store donation bin and replace them with the most shocking band t-shirts you can find. After a time, your father's wife stops buying you new clothes that she knows you will simply dispose of. You are determined to ruin all the photo ops your father is constantly posed for.

Your brother and his friends accept the younger of your stepsisters into their circle immediately, by which you mean she is bossing them around within mere hours of making their acquaintance. She is smarter than all of them put together and wins your respect by being a complete terror in any kind of argument, game or debate. The older daughter is athletic, tomboyish, and obsessed with video games. Your best friend, Tuna, is smitten with her the second she headshots him. She mysteriously seems to find his vulgar tirades and obsession with historical disasters cute rather than off-putting.

Watching him make eyes at your new sister is awkward. Fortunately, you have your own awkward romance to concentrate on. Your other best friend, Meu, is sweet and cheerful and devastating with a backhand compliment. She is nice to kiss, obsessed with cats, and terrible at every subject but creative writing and psych/soc. She drags you out of your own head and helps you laugh at how messy and weird sex and relationships really are. But part of you is still frozen between the idea of being closer to her and the idea of somehow hurting her, somehow losing her. Meu and Tuna have been your best friends since you were all in diapers and remain, incidentally, your only friends. Now that you are That Goth Kid, the rest of your peers give you a wide berth. Only Meu’s older brother goes out of his way to talk to you and he will talk at anything that sits still long enough.

You don’t care about drinking in the woods with the cool kids anyway. You keep busy rereading your way through your Satanic and magical library. You bike out to your grandfather's place every few weeks to trade volumes, concealing their covers with brown paper as if they were school books. You try a new variation on a spell once or twice a week. But the urgency you felt for it over the summer has faded. Your schoolwork is not challenging, something to finish as quickly as possible so you can return to your pursuit of actual knowledge. You frequent occult web forums, first lurking with your browser on private, then logging in and debating people. The Internet is full of idiots and thus an accurate reflection of the rest of the world, you think. You stop covering your books and your web history becomes a deliberate slight to your father's church but he never notices. It is less comforting than it should be.

And though your step sister is older than you and already has her license, you are the one gifted a car for your sixteenth birthday. It is a shitty old sedan that has been sitting on your grandfather's property for years. He hands you the keys with a flourish, as if it's the greatest gift given in the history of mankind. You feel like it might be. You make the mistake of letting your friends help you repaint it and it ends up black with a mess of red, blue and purple polka dots on the trunk, an adorable kitten batting at one of the rear doorhandles, and large patch of a mismatched black where you had to paint over a crude rendering of a penis. Dede says you can park it at his place if it up and gets you into any trouble with your old man.

Your father and his wife go on tour again, leaving all four of you in their stifling house with a hired caretaker. Now that you have a car, you can spend as little time at home as possible. But there is nowhere to go and little to do, plus the price of gas is exorbitant. You get a job at the poser goth store in the mall of the closest big town. It is the only place you can work that encourages you to dye your hair and wear makeup. Also, your father will be incensed when or if he ever finds out. Most of your spare cash goes into gas and the constant small repairs the car seems to need. The rest you use for cigarettes, books, and filling your room with skulls and gory posters. Your new coworkers strike you as dull-eyed drones, fit for little more than a lifetime of cashiering.

Only one of the shift managers seems cool, an older girl named Porrim who’s covered in spiraling tattoos and facial piercings. She encourages you to get your own eyebrow pierced, teaches you how to seal black lipstick and agrees to let you be her practice skin when she starts tattooing at her other job. You spend a lot of time doodling tattoo ideas across your hands and forearms when it gets slow at the store. A fragment of an old Sumerian tablet you saw on some forum sticks in your head so urgently that you decide you can’t wait. When you mention to Porrim that you’re going to give yourself a stick and poke, she insists on doing it for you. After hours of her jabbing a needle into your back, you go into a kind of trance. Her ambient goth soundtrack seems to fill your brain for days afterwards. You know then that you need more, that you want at least as many tattoos as she has.

You get sent to detention every day the first week of eleventh grade for wearing full facepaint to school. Monday of the second week they pull you out of classes and make you sit in the school counselor's office after classes while they call your father. You are there for hours while they leave messages, lecture you, then leave more messages. Eventually the final bell rings and they let you go, wanting to return to whatever mundanities pass for their personal lives. You do not bother to show up for school on Tuesday. By Wednesday you've signed yourself up to take the GED.

The school must reach your father eventually, because he reschedules one of his tour dates to come yell at you in person. His wife takes her daughters to her mother's house midway through your argument. When you throw your atheism in his face, he goes silent in a way that curdles your guts with fear. You have been waiting, angling all this time to be disowned. But his voice when he says, “Get out,” is so quiet, so emotionless, it hits you like a fist in the gut. You storm off to your room and find your brother curled up in your bed.

He says, “Don't up and leave me here alone with him, Bro. Please.”

You bundle your brother and your whole life into your car and drive to your grandfather's. Other than the books and few things of your mother’s, you take only what you have purchased with your own earnings.

You resent your grandfather terribly for calling to tell your father where you are. You are angry and young and too ungrateful to appreciate the deft way Dede defuses his son's temper. You bang off to your room and perch, heart heaving and eyes sore, at your ink stained desk. The pages are still safe in their folder. You run your fingers over the letters of your true name scattered across the wrinkled paper.

Ritual will calm you. Ritual will help you find a new intention, a direction to put your steps in now. You recognize that you have been reacting rather than acting, letting your emotions get the better of you. You must be smarter, if you want to make it on your own. You must be ready to leave your former life behind. You must have a plan.

You clear the top of your desk with a satisfying sweep of your arm. You make the words and gestures up as you go along, focused only on creating a calm and reasoning space inside yourself. You are too upset, shaking, unfocused. The ritual knife slips from your hand and sticks into the floorboard with a clunk, nicking the side of your foot. The tip is piercing a half-open street map, a single drop of your blood sliding down the blade and staining the paper. You stare at it, all the hairs standing up on your arms. The place it marks is near minor city you’ve never heard of, just over the state line. It’s far but not so far you can’t get there and back before dawn.

Your brother and grandfather are asleep on the couch, snoring their near-identical, gentle snores. You wince as your car rattles over each pothole in the dirt driveway. It is late. The country roads are empty.

The drive is over an hour, the radio chattering about alien abductions as you weave around the endless line of big rigs on the highway. Following the map, you take the unfamiliar county roads through corn fields and woods. As you near your destination you can see a red glow in the sky. It is not the sun - it’s still only three thirty.

The red glow is coming from a fire. It is a large, blocky, institutional-looking building with a very wide lawn all around and what might be a section of high, razor wire topped fence around one side. Fire trucks and police cars are already on scene, people running around and being loaded onto buses. You watch for a while, until you notice a knot of cops looking your way. You get back in your car and drive away, carefully observing the speed limit.

It is after five in the morning when you get back to Dede’s. You sleep for much of the next day. You look up the news and find that the fire was at a juvenile detention facility. But nothing else about it seems to signify. Maybe it was a coincidence, a wild goose chase.  
Your father goes back to his tour without even trying to call you. Your step mother calls you so many times that you just turn your phone off and stuff it in your desk drawer. Meu sends you an email urging you to answer your phone and make up with your father. You block her, delete your entire inbox and stop checking that account entirely.

This is the start of your new life, you decide, yours to do whatever you want with. You go to work. You study magic. You start looking for your own apartment.

The GED proves so easy you wish you'd taken it years ago.


End file.
